This best sums up the US position in the Ukraine.  This guy is usually an Obama suck up, but this is a good article;

In the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. has a credibility problem

U.S. Increasingly Isolated On Russia Sanctions

On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry expressed confidence that there was broad international support for imposing tough economic sanctions on Russia unless it withdrew its forces from Ukraine. It took barely a day for a vital American ally to say that it would pursue a different approach — and for evidence to emerge that a second one was likely to break with the Obama administration as well.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of the most powerful figures in the European Union, signaled Monday that she wanted to hold off on sanctions while pursuing a diplomatic solution to the Ukrainian crisis, not one based on the asset freezes, visa bans, and other punitive measures Kerry outlined during his appearance on "Meet the Press." Merkel's government instead favors direct talks with Moscow and the deployment of international monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, which would establish facts on the ground in Ukraine with the aim of assuring Moscow that the rights of ethnic Russians were being respected.

In a second potential blow to the Obama administration, the BBC reported that a senior British official was photographed holding a document stating that London "should not support for now trade sanctions or close London's financial centre to Russians." If the document is authentic, it would mean that the government of British Prime Minister David Cameron, a close U.S. ally, opposed the administration's call for economic sanctions on Russia. Some of that could come from self-interest — wealthy Russians own some of London's most expensive residential properties and are thought to have hundreds of billions of pounds stashed away in British financial institutions — but a Cameron defection would be a major setback for the White House. (...)

Aside from business considerations, maybe it's just the time to return the favour to Mrs. "F-the-EU" Nuland, a.k.a. the 5-billion-dollar-neoconic-woman. "We can rebuild it, we have the technology."

Nobody could see the following comin'...
US media escalates propaganda offensive on Ukraine

In the wake of the right-wing coup in Ukraine organized by the United States and the European powers, the American media is responding with a torrent of inflammatory war propaganda directed against Russia.

In the newspapers and on the airwaves, the demonization of Russia is unrelenting. The coverage of events follows a single simplistic story line. The actions of Russia are portrayed as the epitome of evil. Its president, Vladimir Putin, is the devil incarnate.

The historical background, the economic interests, the political context and the geo-strategic calculations that underlie Russia’s actions are ignored. No facts are allowed to get in the way of the programmed message. No lie is too absurd or ridiculous. The purpose of the propaganda campaign is not to convince public opinion, but to intimidate it.

Monday’s lead editorial (“Russia’s Aggression”) in the New York Times does not contain a trace of analysis. It consists entirely of denunciations, saber-rattling and limitless hypocrisy. (...)

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 

I predict that the US will invade a country in the future. Does this make me as important as Sarah Palin?  I think it does.

 DaveInVA wrote: 
Foreign Policy isn't impressed but thanks you for the clicks.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Russia is Europe's third largest trading partner (after the US, 1, and China, 2), so yeah, go and shoot yourselves in the foot with trade sanctions, why don'tcha.

Gotta love the EU when it gets really really mad:

But at an emergency meeting in Brussels the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy and Spain resisted calls for trade sanctions, instead limiting discussion to freezing long-running talks with Russia on visa liberalisation that would have made it easier for Russians to visit Europe.

  That's really going to have Putin quivering at the knees.

Heard the One About Obama Denouncing a Breach of International Law? - disinformation
"Rather than striving for an evenhanded assessment of how “international law” has become so much coin of the hypocrisy realm, mainline U.S. media are now transfixed with Kremlin villainy. (...) But especially in times of crisis, as with the current Ukraine situation, such inconvenient contradictions go out the mass-media window. What remains is an Orwellian baseline, melding conformist ideology and nationalism into red-white-and-blue doublethink."

Palin's folksy wisdom: the bees will get angry if you disturb a bees' nest.
(and the former obviously has to be blamed on the black man in the white house, never on any neocon hive-poking that's likely to keep on taking place in various designated trees in the forest).

In 'real' news:

Reuters - Russia's Black Sea Fleet has told Ukrainian forces in Crimea to surrender by 0300 GMT on Tuesday or face a military assault, Interfax news agency quoted a source in the Ukrainian Defence Ministry as saying.

 

The ultimatum, Interfax said, was issued by Alexander Vitko, the fleet's commander. 

 

The ministry did not immediately confirm the report and there was no immediate comment by the Black Sea Fleet, which has a base in Crimea, where Russian forces are in control.

 

"If they do not surrender before 5 a.m. tomorrow, a real assault will be started against units and divisions of the armed forces across Crimea," the agency quoted the ministry source as saying.

Russian Defense Ministry dismisses Ukraine ultimatum reports as ‘total nonsense’ — RT News

 haresfur wrote: 

Had no intention of going down the hypothetical road.

Just based upon Obama's total lack of any coherant foreign policy (and his US Senate voting record), the outcome was very predictable and she got it right (and within a specified time period), for whatever reasons.

That is all.

 kurtster wrote: 
I don't see how she got anything right.  The quote said they might invade the Ukraine I think everyone knew there were instabilities there at least since Russia started using energy supply as a political weapon during the time of a previous US administration.  And there are pretty clear reasons they would support the ethnic Russian nationalists in the Crimea so it was pretty obvious to everyone, including the Ukrainians that this was likely to occur.  But of course they weren't going to do anything while there was a pro-Russian Ukraine government.  I don't think anyone is suggesting that keeping that government was a better situation.  The fact of the matter is that we have awfully limited influence there and that would be true under any administration.  And we don't have an alternate world to test the hypothesis that something different would have happened if she was president.

 kurtster wrote: 

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
yep, over joyed even.  time to call it a day.

my 6 day weekend is being interupted by an extra day of work in the morning.

g'night.

 kurtster wrote: 
Kurtster, that was really insightful.

(happy now?)

 haresfur wrote: 
How many things does someone have to get right before they get any credit for their insight ?

 kurtster wrote: 
She could have just said Russia might invade the Ukraine sometime.  I don't see how any US President would have affected this.  Even Regan who had them convinced he was effin nuts, wouldn't have much influence, unless he could figure out a way to trade them arms for Crimea.

 DaveInVA wrote: 

She evidently learned a lot more about foreign policy by being able to see Russia from her back door than Obama did restringing basketball hoops on Chicago playgrounds ...

And yes, I don't mind Palin ... except her voice, too flippin shrill.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Add the high-minded talk about sovereignty...

Sovereignty means very little when drones enter other countries, against their wishes, and kill their civilians.
Sovereignty means little when 5 billion $ gets invested in Ukraine's opposition to "promote democracy" (or on a smaller scale in Venezuela).

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Reports this morning are that large numbers of Ukrainian troops are defecting.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
Telling me! It feels a bit close to home as it is.

Given the current situation, that fighting has not actually started and an uneasy truce prevails I honestly think that the only sensible way foward is to split Crimea off from the Ukraine and turn both into separate countries. This would appease Russia and the demonstrators would get what they wanted, an independent state that could move closer to Europe. As it is there is a huge risk of war and everyone losing something if not everything.

The anti-Russian rhetoric coming from the west is a bit rich. John Kerry seems to have conviently forgotten that the US marched into Iraq on less of a pretext than that facing Russia right now. The majority of the Crimea is Russian. Crimea even belonged to Russia until 1954 (well just gloss over the fact that the Soviets ethnically cleansed it before that but, hey ho).

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
I think you're right, Putin had it away in Georgia, or what became Georgia less South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in 2008. And that was, to a greater or lesser extent, a shooting war. The lesser extent meaning it was one between two utterly mismatched opponents.
 
I imagine that the Russians must want the Crimea hugely - their Black Sea fleet is based there, and they negotiated hard to keep a presence there at the breakup of the USSR. Looks like they'll get it, because what else can Ukraine do?
 
Blimey. If this kind of shit was happening in the eighties we'd all be bricking ourselves.